How 2018 could be (another) 'Year of the Woman' | Opinion

I was born in 1984, the year that Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major party presidential ticket as the Democratic vice presidential candidate. Since then, I've been witness to other milestones for women in American politics -- from historic gains in representation in 1992 to key firsts for women at all levels of political leadership. But the overall gains for women in the past 34 years have been slow, and expectations of another "Year of the Woman" like 1992 often have been overstated.

Will 2018 be another "Year of the Woman" in American politics?

There is no denying that women are highly engaged in this year's election -- as activists and advocates, donors and candidates. At the Center for American Women and Politics, we track the numbers of women running in each election cycle, and we anticipate record-setting numbers of women will ultimately file for candidacy across levels of office this year.

At this point in the race, the numbers of likely women candidates for Congress is double what it was at this point in the 2016 cycle, and more than twice as many women are likely to run for governor this year than were contemplating a gubernatorial run at this point in 2014.

But these numbers need some context.

First, the "pink wave" that has been touted by media is also pretty blue. Nearly all of the increase in likely U.S. House candidates from the 2016 to 2018 cycles, for example, is among Democratic women -- many who appear motivated by the 2016 election to run for office so that they can hold the line against the party and president in power.

Many of these women are running as challengers to incumbents. These are always tough races to run, and in many districts they are pitting women against each other for party nominations.

That said, if any recent cycle has the potential to buck these normal hurdles to candidate success, it might be this one. In 2017, one-third of the women who ran as challengers in contests for Virginia's House of Delegates were successful, and Democrat Doug Jones mobilized voters in the red state of Alabama to turn a long-red U.S. Senate seat blue.

Beyond these partisan dynamics, there are two more reasons for caution in proclaiming another "Year of the Woman" in 2018.

First, there are fewer open seats in 2018, at least at this point, than there were in the post-redistricting year of 1992.

This just means there may be fewer opportunities for women to capitalize on competitive seats.

And second, while there are more women running this year, there are also more men in the candidate pool.

In 2016, about 19 percent of filed candidates were women. This year, they are on track to be about 23 percent.

Even if women do not double their numbers in Congress this year, as they did in 1992, the women running this year are disrupting our expectations of political leadership and making a statement that this moment of reckoning with gender imbalances of power is occurring in politics, too.

We all can be a part of this reckoning by recognizing that women's political underrepresentation is a problem; that we all play a role in challenging expectations of how a candidate or officeholder looks or behaves; and that this push for women's political power is a long game, not a problem remedied in one election cycle.

Kelly Dittmar is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University-Camden and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of "Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns" (Temple University Press, 2015).